Sundance Film Festival

I find Post Logic colorist Doug Delaney at 5pm, almost exactly 12 hours after he put the last flourish on Adventures of Power and pushed send on the print. He’s multi-tasking coffee and laundry; he’s had plenty of the one and run out of the other. Most of the people who work on the films here spend months if not years (even decades) of their lives on the projects. The DI colorist gets a few intense weeks in that special antechamber to reality where everyone shares the stressful truth: the movie will be finished, and soon.

I think about director Ari Gold seeing his movie just days before all of Sundance will (everyone who can get tickets). But I can remember back before DI and digital prints when many people in the Sundance theaters were seeing their own movie for the first time—they last left it in pieces on the way to the lab. That still happens, even with digital prints. But these days, even though filmmakers see the final print late in the game, if they’ve had a post house DI they’ve probably seen most of it–looking the best it ever will—on the monitors and 2K projectors in the DI suite.

DI and digital projection haven’t just changed the presentation game. DI also means the tools of commercial telecine are available to feature films. Pandora’s Box! Initially people worried that all of cinema would become punched up and oversaturated, or that filmmakers would disappear into the room of endless opportunity and never make another decision. Didn’t really happen that way. Sometimes DPs can’t even make it and when they do they’re usually as meticulous and time-conscious as they have to be when they’re losing the light. Directors can over think in DI, but sometimes they get restless—and tired of confronting their own movie in such minutiae over and over.

Still Adventures of Power sounds like just the kind of film that everyone was worried about.

With its outlandish story of an air drummer auteur (played by writer/director Gold), and its variety of musical numbers and surreal settings, it was the kind of movie that needed to go over the top. “We went completely ridiculous, painted the thing with a greenish wash, with a streaky, trippy flavor to it that transitions to a blue, gritty, vignetty kind of feel,” Delaney says. For the character’s home state of New Mexico, the coppery gold flowed.

Shot on Super 16 by DP Lisa Wiegand, transferred to HDCAM SR and brought in as data to the DI suite (as 10 bit DPX files) it was wide open for interpretation and improvisation.

“To do more extreme things it’s hard to get inside someone’s brain,” Delaney says of the Power DI—one of four he did at Post Logic for this year’s Sundance. “You have to shove everything off a cliff to find out where the edge of it is. Then you tweak it and pull back a little bit. This was definitely one of those cases.”

It was also one of those cases where Delaney had to slightly adapt his normal policy of avoiding audio until near the end of the process (“music can smooth things out like a bump in color and we won’t catch it”). But with Power, there were times where music and color had to work together–as when the our unlikely hero Power has a moment with a girl in the dirty, dark, cyany kitchen of a Chinese restaurant as the music and photography swell into golden tones.

Adventures of Power is screening at Park City at Midnight on Sunday at the Egyptian. Also screening Monday (2:30), and next Saturday (1145) at Holiday Village Cinema II and in Salt Lake on Thursday (9pm) at the Tower. Click here for theater info